Brown asserts his school-funding plan is 'a matter of civil rights'

SACRAMENTO — Flanked by superintendents of many of California's largest school districts, Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday issued a feisty defense of his plan to boost funding for schools in the state's most impoverished communities.

"This is a matter of equity and civil rights. If people are going to fight it, they'll get the battle of their lives," Brown said at a Capitol news conference. "We're talking about the facts of life in California, and the facts of life are deep inequities."

Brown's budget proposes to radically change the way public schools are funded by eliminating most of the money the state now earmarks for specific programs, giving local districts more flexibility in determining how to spend their resources, providing supplemental funding for students who either come from low-income families or have limited English skills, and offering an additional boost to districts in which a majority of students are in those categories.

The proposal has met with robust opposition from leaders of suburban districts, who argue it would shortchange their students and prevent the districts from fully recovering from spending cuts implemented over the past several years.

In a position paper released earlier this month, the California School Boards Association said "a discussion of school finance reform has to include a plan that at minimum fully restores past funding reductions to schools as it incorporates principles of equity."

The news conference came a day before Senate leaders are scheduled to release an alternative proposal that would restore some of the categorical programs the governor seeks to eliminate and reject the idea of providing supplemental grants to districts with high concentrations of disadvantaged students.

The Senate proposal also would delay changes in current school funding formulas for one year.

Brown said the concentration factor is essential, and asserted that there are fundamentally more complex challenges for schools in poor urban neighborhoods than for schools in more affluent communities.

"Increasingly, the state is turning into a two-tier society," he said.

The proposed reforms are being suggested at a time when, as a result of a recovering economy and voter approval of temporary tax increases last fall, Brown is proposing a 5 percent increase in school funding next year. An additional increase is expected when the governor's revised budget is released next month, as state tax collections are now running about $4 billion above projections.

Proposition 98, the state's minimum school-funding guarantee, will require that much of that surplus be spent on schools.

"If you spread it out to all the districts, it will have a trivial effect," Brown said. "If you put it in districts that have a high concentration of poverty, it will have a powerful effect."

Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy concurred.

"The concentration factor is at the heart of equity," he said. "It allows students with the greatest challenges to have the greatest amount of support."

A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California suggests a majority of state voters stand with Brown on this issue. It found 60 percent of likely voters support the idea of directing more funding to English learners and lower-income students and two-thirds believe targeting the money in such a way would improve those students' academic performance.

About 60 percent of California's 6 million children in public schools fall into at least one of those two categories.

"Why is California so much at the bottom?" Brown asked, referring to test results measuring student achievement. "It's because we have so many poor kids and so many who don't speak English. This is about the essence of what California needs to be about. This has been designed to deal with the problem."

Brown was joined at the news conference by 20 superintendents representing cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, Oakland and Bakersfield.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, and other Senate leaders are scheduled to unveil details of their school funding proposal at a news conference Thursday.